We’re starting a work on Colombian government spending by scraping information of contracts from a public government site which has them but not in a machine readable form. Pieces are there: the scrapper is on Github, the visualization of “Silence Maps” has an alpha, but I think that we need a more inclusive, plural and articulated place to have conversations instead of a Google Group. I think that here is that better place with the side advantage of getting a panoramic view of what’s happening in other places/languages on the same subjects that we’re trying to promote here (Open Data, Open Knowledge, Science and Research), so this very infrastructure can work as a “green house” to help this initiatives to blossom, specially now that they’re young in almost all the world.

For that we will need a new kind of category about Local/Language Groups, so people interested in particular places can have a conversation in their language on the different projects and initiatives. May be subcategories can be by language and then by country, to have a broader conversation with links to the related initiatives in English, so we can articulate local and global in a two ways talk.

I have two concerns about this proposal: 1) Taking to long to be discussed/approved, because creating a google group is cheap, so despite discourse and OKFN being a “better place” for conversation most people will trade best for quickness. 2) The lack of support for mailing integration as I see is being discussed here on Meta, which is also given by default on Google Groups.

So, the Colombian group on government spending and open data is young and we don’t have a lot of legacy discussions on any place. We could start here quickly, beta test and give feedback.

@Offray, nice to meet you! I’m Mor, Open Knowledge International Community Coordinator.

Couple of questions I have -1.Do you know our local groups scheme? We don’t have a local group in Colombia, and we would love to collaborate with you over there.

We are working on integrating the discourse forum better. We are doing it slowly and in stages. Currently, we didn’t move it to our local group and languages stage, and I would like to think it through before opening a local group here. Notice that we did open groups to some of our local projects (Like the Australian open data index) but not to a group. In the case of Latin America we have other stakeholders to consider as well, so I want to do it thoroughly). Can we discuss it quickly before opening up a category here? Please email me at local@okfn.org

@belkinsa, thanks for the help here. Next time, please can you consult with Central first? To be fair, we need to update our plans to this platform, so I promise to put an update ASAP so we can all be synced.